Bay of Spirits: A Love Story

by Farley Mowat

  “Time was,” Dolph told me as we stood outside watching the night overwhelm the ruins below us, “when they was Morgans aplenty hereabouts. We worked as a crowd, you know. One for all, and all for one. Nobody got too big for their britches, and nobody went without. We was our own co-op. After Confederation, with schooner building going out, Smallwood’s government give us the concession for cutting timber in the country roundabout Head of the Bay.

  “We kept two mills busy–here, and at Little River–and we done very good with it. Then the Strickland brothers, them as is the merchants at Milltown, along of the Church of England minister and the Roman Catholic priest at St. Alban’s, wanted a share in the concession. We was agreeable–but what they had in mind was to take full charge.

  “The Member [of the provincial parliament] for the Bay was on their side. They put in their own manager, a very religious man he was too. He set up a new kind of bookkeeping and within the year our co-op was belly up. Bankrupt, they says nowadays.”

  The provincial government withdrew the Robertses’ concession and gave it to the Milltown consortium, which also acquired the co-op’s other assets. Loggers, haulers, and millers who had made their livelihood inside the co-op now found themselves beholden to Strickland Brothers, who paid fourteen dollars a cord for finding, cutting, and bringing wood out of the interior and rafting it to Milltown, where the Stricklands sold it “in the water” to foreign freighters at twenty-four dollars the cord.

  “Cutting pulp these times is starvation wages,” Dolph continued, “but people got no choice. The government welfare officer has his orders. Either you cuts for Stricklands at Stricklands’ price or you loses your welfare benefits. So it’s take what’s offered or be cut off sharp. No unemployment insurance. Nothing but the bare-naked dole to keep you and yours from starving.”

  Dolph’s description of the state of affairs was confirmed by the welfare officer, an earnest young man named Selby Moss. He told us that of the thousand-odd adults living in and around Head of the Bay, 80 per cent of the able-bodied were unemployed and living on the dole, as last-ditch relief has long been called in Newfoundland. Moreover, most families had been on it for several years.

  “Bowater [the British-owned pulp-and-paper company that dominated the industry in Newfoundland] closed down its operations around the bay four years ago, without so much as a thank-you-and-goodbye. A good many people here had come in from the coast to work for Bowater when the salt-fish racket went under. Now they got nowhere to go. Nothing for them anywheres on the Island. Only the dole. I don’t rightly know where ’twill end. My wife and me belongs to Bonavista Bay. Been here two years and I don’t say as we’ll stick it much longer. If the department don’t shift us out we’ll pack up and go. This place’s got the creeping sickness.”

  The hospitality extended to us at Head of the Bay had been generous to a fault but this bleak re-entry into the real world was leaving a sour taste.

  Milltown had few attractions. One morning at two I was rousted from my bunk to shift Happy Adventure out of the way of the coast steamer Bonavista. Then I had to shift again when a big RCMP cutter nosed alongside demanding mooring space. The policemen who formed her crew came sniffing about, patently curious about what my business on the Sou’west Coast might be. As if this was not enough, we had barely finished breakfast when a float plane full of prospectors thundered in and wanted our berth. The pilot was brusque in his demands and I lost my temper. By the time I rejoined Claire down below, I was seething.

  “Goddamn world is too much with us here. Let’s get the hell out of it.”

  “Could we go back to St. Pierre?”

  “Not yet, damn it. We haven’t begun to explore the bay. Let’s go visit the Mi’kmaqs.”

  An hour’s easy sail brought us into the broad mouth of the Conne, the second-largest river flowing into Bay Despair. The only native settlement extant in Newfoundland stood on its banks, inhabited by descendants of Mi’kmaqs brought by the French to the Sou’west Coast from Nova Scotia during the eighteenth century to trap the furs so much valued by Europeans.

  The existing native settlement consisted of about thirty families whose houses, widely dispersed along the shore of the river estuary, ranged from typical Newfoundland style–nearly flat-roofed, two-storey, wooden structures–to one-room log cabins.

  There was no wharf, for these were not people of the sea. As we rowed ashore, several girls came down to the beach. Dark-eyed, dark-skinned, and black-haired, they greeted us shyly but with warmth. Geraldine and Adeline, pretty ten-or twelve-year-olds, undertook to guide us to the home of their uncle Sylvester Jedore, who, we had been told in Milltown, was chief of the band. The sandy trail leading through the settlement was crowded with people of all ages, none of them apparently in any great hurry. Men, women, and children sauntered past and, though they did not speak, all gave us friendly looks.

  Our young guides led us to their uncle’s house only to learn that he and his whole family were off on the inland barrens picking berries. So the girls took us to the log cabin of Michael John, another uncle. His wife, sixty-seven-year-old Emilia John, welcomed us into her little kitchen. She was, as she put it, “blind as Old Tom” (their rangy, half-wild cat), and had been so for a decade. She told us she was a “white woman” from St. Alban’s on the other side of Short Reach.

  “When Michael marry me I come to live here with his folks, and never had no cause to wish I didn’t. He never give I a cross word in all our life. I’d never let nobody touch a hair o’ that man’s head.”

  The girls had gone to fetch Michael, who came hurrying in with an armful of wood to stoke up the stove and “bile the kettle” so the visitors could have tea. In his seventies, with deeply creased mahogany skin and the sparse, tight body and walk of a woodsman, he was voluble and active. Although going deaf and suffering from fainting spells because, as Emilia told us, “the poor man finds his heart,” he did most of the indoor as well as the outdoor work.

  Now he scurried about seeing to our comfort. Had we eaten? There was bottled moose meat in the pantry and freshly baked bread…or would we prefer bannock? He would have the tea on the table in a minute; meanwhile, here was a plate of raisin cookies.

  The tea was strong but lavishly laced with condensed milk. Bread, which he had baked himself, was slathered with his own raspberry jam. He apologized for the quality of the bread, explaining that he and Emilia preferred bannock and made bread mainly for the chickens, because bread made the birds lay better.

  Grateful as we were for what was put before us, what we really wanted was to hear their story.

  They talked freely and without a trace of self-pity even as they told us of the loss of four of their children. One son had been killed when a saw “exploded” at Strickland’s lumber mill, another had died in action with the Canadian army in Italy, and two daughters had died in their teens during a diphtheria epidemic.

  Trapping and hunting had provided their livelihood.

  “Even in the Hard Times the country fed us. Them times the government was giving the white folks as was fishing on the coast or working in the woods six cents a day dole, and they was hungry. We got plenty caribou, patridge, and rabbits in the woods and out on the barrens. Duck, fish, and seals from the bay. Salmon and trout from the brooks.

  “We travelled wherever the animals was. Come dirty weather we stayed snug in our tents and tilts. Nowadays most everyone lives in houses. The woman and me don’t care for that, but we can’t go onto the country no more, so here we stays.”

  A brisk easterly breeze had risen while we were talking. Combined with the fast-rising tide, it made our anchorage unsafe so I decided to run back to Milltown for shelter. Michael and Emilia were as loath to see us go as we were to leave, but there was no help for it.

  After we were again moored in Milltown, Dolph came aboard to suggest we visit John Barnes, a tidy little man who had been a local teacher for forty years and was renowned for his unbending rectitude. “Sooner be et by
a bear than tell a lie,” was how Dolph characterized him.

  A natural-born historian, John Barnes had a great deal to tell about early days at Head of the Bay, where his father had settled in 1869.

  He told us that the first settlers had made a large part of their income from cutting spruce and birch “rind” (bark), used to line the holds of schooners carrying salt-bulk fish to foreign markets.

  “There was no money on the go them times. You traded for what you needed. The people took the rind to Gaultois in rowing boats. Later they built bigger boats and sailed they to Harbour Breton and St. Pierre.

  “Michael Collier come to the bay same time as my old dad and settled close to the Indian camp at Conne. He pretty near became one of them and had six sons by an Indian wife. He planned out, and him and his sons built, a forty-ton schooner specially for the shoal waters of Conne and Little River. Flat-bottomed she was. Very shoal draft. Very broad, and no keel at all so she would stand on her own feet when she dried out. When the tide rose again she’d float off good as new.

  “Mainly she was rowed with six great sweeps, one for each of the sons, but she was rigged with a leg-o’-mutton and square sails too. Having no keel she could only run before the wind, but Michael and his boys would take that ugly old thing all the way to St. Pierre loaded to the gunwales with billets of firewood, barrel staves, lumber, and country meat.

  “If the wind was foul, they’d row her all the way. Six men rowed four hours at a stretch, then they’d take a break and have a scoff in their little galley in the forepeak.

  “They’d take six gallons of rum aboard at St. Pierre, but never land a drop of it at Conne because the Indians never knowed how to drink, and Michael respected that. ’Twas said him and the boys would drain the kegs before they come ashore, then the lot of them would sleep for a week.”

  We had some reservations about this account but Dolph again assured us John Barnes was incapable of lying. In proof thereof he told us another story:

  “Geese used to pitch at Head of the Bay and John’s brother Obie was a great gunner. One day a fellow in a motorboat was heading up the bay when he came across John rowing his dory.

  “‘Did your brother get any geese this year?’ the fellow asked.

  “‘I believe he did get a couple,’ John replied.

  “The fellow went on his way but, glancing astern, he saw John rowing after him hard as he could row so he stopped the engine and waited till John come up, huffing and puffing something awful.

  “‘I may have told you a lie,’ John says when he finds his breath. ‘I believe one of they was a gander.’”

  Time was now running out for Claire, who had to return to her job in a week’s time. First she was anxious to revisit St. Pierre and our friends there but I was so enamoured of the Bay of Spirits I did not want to leave. This was an impasse that could have festered. Claire would not let that happen. She deferred to my wishes, but with such grace that I became ashamed of myself and changed my mind. So one fine morning we let go our lines, crowded on all sail, and went scudding down Short Reach bound for the French Isles.

  We had a magnificent run until we entered the head of Long Reach, where we were struck by a ferocious squall roaring out of the canyoned mouth of Little River–a gust that laid Happy Adventure over until her lee rail went under and water was pouring into her steering well.

  Thrusting the tiller into Claire’s hands, I leapt to free the main sheet from its cleat so the vessel could right herself, but I had foolishly made the line fast with a half hitch and this had jammed as the sheet came bar-tight. I had to cut it free, while Claire clung to the tiller for dear life, wide-eyed and certain we were going to go all the way over.

  Once the wind had spilled out of the mainsail, the schooner regained her feet and we skittered on past the long, rocky finger of Cape Mark to the safety of open water.

  “You all right?” I asked as I took the tiller back from Claire.

  “I think so,” she replied somewhat shakily, “but please let’s not do that again.”

  This was our first experience with a blow-me-down–an unexpected squall of hurricane strength that seems to come out of nowhere and can dismast a big ship or overturn a small one. Blow-me-downs are among the least attractive features of fiord country, where narrow waterways surrounded by high hills form natural wind tunnels.

  Once things had settled down, I got us both a belt of brandy. In doing so I realized I had forgotten to pour a libation to the Old Man of the Sea, a ritual learned from my father, who claimed to have learned it from a white-bearded ancient in Liverpool who had sailed the world in clipper ships. Tradition has it that the Old Man–Neptune, some call him–likes his drop and so, before setting out on a voyage, it is wise to pour a healthy dollop over the side for him.

  “Insurance,” was what Angus called it. And I had forgotten to pay the premium. I made up for that neglect and a hard but steady quartering breeze whipped us south through Long Reach to Little Passage. This was a narrow-gutted twister several miles long and no place for the faint-hearted, especially when wind and tide were fighting as they were this day. The coast steamers used Little Passage, and two weeks earlier the Bar Haven had failed to make an especially tight bend and had shoved her bow into a mountain. Fortunately the shore was so sheer she had been able to back off with no more serious damage than a crumpled prow–and the temporary loss of her skipper’s dignity.

  Rounding Margery Head at the end of the passage, we opened Hermitage Bay to find it frothing white, for the wind had now built to a sou’west gale. We made no attempt to buck our way across the bay but unabashedly ran for shelter in nearby Gaultois.

  Once a major whaling port, Gaultois now boasted (or was afflicted by) a big modern fish plant that had turned the harbour into such a stinking stew as might have offended even old-time whalers. We moored at a wharf where a covey of small boys took our lines before running off to the plant to fetch us a pail of freshly cut cod tongues and cheeks. These I fried in salt pork fat while Claire contrived a salad made from blanched asparagus tips (out of a can, of course) and homemade mayonnaise. The whole was washed down by a bottle of Sauterne from Happy Adventure’s cellar.

  I noted in my journal:

  Surely there is no more pleasant thing than to moor in a safe harbour, well fed and well lubricated, after an exciting voyage with a really good companion.

  We sipped coffee and Drambuie, recalled the blow-me-down, wondered over the flight of a dozen eagles who had soared close over us in Little Passage, and enjoyed the glow of unabashed admiration for one another.

  I feel I am ready to go anywhere with Claire, though she may have some legitimate reservations about doing likewise with me.

  The gale blew itself out and a lovely evening ensued so we went for a cross-country walk to investigate the neighbouring outport of Pink Bottom. Claire had accused me of having invented the name but there it was–a handful of houses near the bottom of a deep gulch originally settled by a man named Pink. This superb natural harbour boasted a newly built government wharf and a fleet of ten or twelve dories, none of which was being fished. Everyone here, so we discovered, had given up fishing to work on the assembly (or disassembly) lines at The Plant in Gaultois.

  Even the name of the community was being changed. Like so many Newfoundland place names of character and colour, Pink Bottom had been officially rejected by bureaucratic Mother Grundies, in favour of Picarre, which had no significance for anyone.

  Returning to the Gaultois wharf, we found it overrun by about twenty children playing on teeter-totters they had made for themselves from heavy construction planks balanced over a stone retaining wall. On these they soared up and down, fearless of the rocks below on one side and the rising tide on the other. As they soared they sang (more or less in harmony) children’s songs that had crossed the Western Ocean centuries earlier from seaports in Devon and Dorset. We pondered how enormously lucky they were to have been born in a corner of the world where they were free to be
themselves and where adult sanctions had not deprived them of the right to live at risk.

  We woke next morning gasping and choking. I struggled on deck, to discover it was dead low water. Very, very dead. The fallen tide had exposed such a collection of rotting fish carcasses from the plant that the very air seemed to resonate with the stench. And there appeared to be no escape, for we were aground.

  Claire dealt with this emergency. From somewhere in her meagre baggage she produced two sticks of incense. Not then, or ever, has she volunteered an explanation of how or why she had them. No matter; they did the trick, enabling us to breathe until the rising tide refloated us and we could flee from Gaultois.

  We had a lovely sail across Hermitage Bay, whose deep bight fell away to the eastward of us in majestic grandeur. We slipped between a pair of massive headlands on the far side, experiencing the never-failing excitement of entering a new harbour.

  Hermitage Cove’s outer anchorage was filled with fishing boats. We sailed past them and through a tickle into a small barasway forming one of the snuggest harbours in Newfoundland. Here we anchored and rowed ashore to look for the brothers Sandy and Kent Hill, who, according to Dolph Roberts, were particularly knowledgeable about Bay Despair. They were away at their nets but before long their thirty-five-foot motorboat came chugging into the harbour and dropped anchor near Happy Adventure.

  I rowed across to them, bearing the heel of a bottle of brandy, introduced myself, and was welcomed aboard by a burly pair of wind-and-weather-worn men with red faces, gleaming teeth, and the calm certainty of twin Buddhas. They had been fishing cod with nylon gill nets–a major innovation on a coast whose waters had for centuries been fished with jiggers, handlines, cod traps, and baited longlines, until the massive post-war surge of industrial-scale fishing dependent on ocean-going draggers and factory ships had so depleted fish stocks that inshore fishermen could no longer make a living with traditional gear.